Happy families may be all alike, but Supreme Courts are not families. The famous description of a Court as "nine scorpions in a bottle," I think, overstates the craziness of a life-tenured multi-member appellate court; but every Court is built around nine independent, powerful personalities, each of whom arrives on the bench used to being the smartest person in any given room. These egos circle chaotically until they fall into complicated, unstable mutual orbits. The "three-body problem" is a classic example of how complex gravity and motion can be; Court watches must use inadequate data to approximate a "nine-body problem"--an entire solar system--as they try to understand a new Court.

And this is a very new Court. Between 2006 and 2010, the Court gained four new members, including a new chief justice. The last such comparable upheaval was in the 1980s, before I went to law school. I became a professor studying the dynamic of that Court--headed by William Rehnquist, with Sandra Day O'Connor in the swing seat. In many ways, it was as stable as a sitcom in reruns. Indeed, after the appointment of Stephen Breyer in 1994, the Court began to resemble the Brezhnev-era politburo: no change at all for more than a decade, practically a record in Supreme Court history.

I doubt this Court will write a record of great concern for unions, or for the poor, or for the unpopular, in general. But if it will continue to protect their speech, that is something.

Now the system has undergone a startling youthquake that has reduced the average age of a justice by a decade. At oral argument, the stars of the old generation--calm, deliberative Anthony Kennedy and irascible, preening Antonin Scalia--look and sound like old newsreel footage. This Court belongs to the new kids on the block.

Bill Rehnquist served on the Court for more than 30 years, and was chief for nearly 20. By about 2030, commentators will know which areas of law in 2011 were about to change and which parts remained more or less stable. But it begins to seem as if First Amendment speech jurisprudence will be one of the latter. The new Court's recent cases follow the precedents and principles that have governed this area for more than 50 years. Those precedents and principles have been sharply questioned by thinkers on and off the Court; the prospect of their survival is remarkable.

I make this rash prediction on the basis of a number of key cases from the past two terms. The most recent, of course, is Snyder v. Phelps, in which the Court held that a Maryland jury could not award multimillion-dollar damages against the repellent members of the Westboro Baptist Church for their homophobic picketing at the funeral of an American soldier killed in Iraq (PDF). Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion reaching this unpopular result; what's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is by historic standards. Indeed, it reads like an A answer in any law-school First Amendment seminar since 1980 or so, breaking no new ground and questioning none of the Court's bedrock First Amendment principles. "Given that Westboro's speech was at a public place on a matter of public concern, that speech is entitled to 'special protection' under the First Amendment," Roberts wrote. "Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt."

This principle--that speech is protected despite (or perhaps because of) general agreement that it is disgusting--was the centerpiece of the Warren Court's vision of the First Amendment. It's not an inevitable part of the analysis; over the years, a number of justices have wanted the Court instead to begin a complex weighing of the "value" of speech, with less protection for the worthless. But like one of Richard Dawkins's powerful memes, protection for vile speech has jumped from the Warren to the Burger to the Rehnquist Courts, and now has found a home in the brain of John Roberts himself.

Not only did Roberts write Snyder; he also gamely wrote another orthodox First Amendment opinion in United States v. Stevens, which struck down a federal statute making it a crime to sell videos of animal cruelty (PDF). Roberts used one of the Warren Court's most powerful free-speech doctrines, the concept of "substantial overbreadth," which permits free-speech challengers to succeed even if a properly drawn statute might constitutionally ban their specific speech. That doctrine has been criticized by conservatives as too speech-protective; but the new Court showed little interest in limiting its sweep.

Both these opinions were lopsided wins for free speech--8-1 decisions, with only Justice Alito dissenting. Several commentators have pointed out that Alito has emerged as the single justice with the most concern for those harmed by distasteful speech and public criticism. George Washington University Professor Jeffery Rosen last week christened him the Court's "privacy cop." But this cop walks a pretty lonely beat. Alito's anguished dissents in Stevens and Snyder, in fact, remind me of lonely First Amendment dissents by then-Justice Rehnquist, who was very much a free-speech skeptic when he came to the Court. By the end of his tenure, Rehnquist had largely converted, and wrote the Court's classic opinion in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, protecting the most worthless of speech: a sleazeball pornographer's proudly false satirical depiction of a TV preacher as a hypocritical, incestuous drunk.

The survival of the Warren-Burger Court's First Amendment doctrine is striking because many of the concerns that gave rise to its seminal cases have changed dramatically. Precedents like New York Times v. Sullivan, which limited libel actions against speech of public importance, Nebraska Press Association v. Stewart, which struck down court-ordered gags on media speech, and Miller v. California, which restricted state obscenity statutes, arose out of civil-liberties and culture wars that are definitively over today. The Warren Court, and its First Amendment tactician, William J. Brennan, saw itself as shepherding the country out of a period when local majorities maintained control by aggressively shutting down minority speech. If "most of us" found speech distasteful, that was in itself reason to protect it. "One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric," Justice John Marshall Harlan in a case establishing every American's right to go to the courthouse wearing a jacket that says FUCK THE DRAFT.

Public speech today is (to quote Brennan in Times v. Sullivan) "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" to a historically astounding degree. Sam Alito surely is not the only one feeling tempted to cut back just a bit on all this toleration of what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called "opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death." (Justice Steven Breyer plainly wishes we could find a way to make everyone nicer, and often says so from the bench.)

But the free-speech jurisprudence survives for many reasons: because it is popular, both with the public at large and with the powerful interests that live by free communication of ideas and images; because the decisions at its base are well-crafted and easy to apply; and because robust protection of free speech provides a benefit, at one time or another, to all sides of the political and economic spectrum. Certainly, the existing free-speech doctrine isn't all great news for progressives. Many people may chafe at a regime that protects cigarette advertising aimed at children almost as fully as it protects independent press reporting; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission uses old fashioned Brennan-style free-speech rhetoric to gut any attempt to limit concentrated wealth in politics (PDF). And not long ago I was at a panel where a prominent union lawyer ridiculed the First Amendment as "the most overrated Amendment" because of the way it protects employer anti-union campaigns in the workplace.

I doubt this Court will write a record of great concern for unions, or for the poor, or for the unpopular, in general. But if it will continue to protect their speech, that is something. And in the wake of the brilliant protest campaign by labor advocates in Wisconsin against Republican union-busting, even a cynical labor lawyer might be tempted to rate the First Amendment more highly.

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.